journalism
Morgan On Marcus Rashford: Did Someone Say ‘Hypocrisy’?
When Piers Morgan was 26, he’d been running The Sun’s showbiz column, Bizarre, for two years.
A self-confessed “rampant egomaniac” who used his pages to get himself “pictured all the time with famous people” who “didn’t know [him] from Adam”, he was just two years away from being anointed Editor of the News of the World by Rupert Murdoch.
His behaviour there, and in his subsequent role as Editor of the Daily Mirror, is still being unpicked now, including at the High Court in December 2023, when Justice Fancourt found that senior executives at the Mirror, including Morgan, were aware that phone-hacking was taking place.
A puffed-up and pompous Morgan delivered a statement outside his west-London home denying ever hacking a phone or asking anyone to hack a phone.
That’s the same Piers Morgan who wrote that someone told him how phone-hacking was achieved in his 2001 ‘diaries’ The Insider; described listening to a tape of one of Heather Mills’ phone messages – a clip of her then husband Paul McCartney “pleading with her to come back… and even [singing] We Can Work It Out” – in a 2006 Daily Mail column; and explained how it worked over lunch at the Mirror’s HQ while teasing Ulrika Jonsson about details of her private conversations, according to Jeremy Paxman’s evidence at the Leveson Inquiry.
Putting the hotly-denied phone-hacking to one side, Morgan’s twenties were a period when he twice published pictures of well-known women at addiction clinics – first the then wife of Earl Spencer shown leaving an addictive disorder clinic in the News of the World; then supermodel Naomi Campbell papped entering a Narcotics Anonymous meeting by the Mirror, which led to a very costly privacy judgement against the publisher.
Morgan responded to that loss by raging that it was “a good day for lying, drug-abusing prima donnas”. Of course, Morgan, who has been engaging in public flounces ever since, knows nothing about being a prima donna.
Morgan was 31 when he used the Mirror’s front page to scream ‘Achtung Surrender!’ on the eve of England men’s football team’s match with Germany in the semi-finals of Euro ‘96. He was 35 when he was embroiled in a scandal over share tipping, judged to have breached the financial journalism code of conduct by the Press Complaints Commission but cleared by the Department of Trade and Industry.
That’s just a selection of the greatest (s)hits of Morgan’s early career – and there’s a good reason for reminding you of them.
As part of his ongoing effort to be named not just 'Hypocrite of the Year’ but 'Hypocrite of the Century’, Morgan used a recent Sun column to dispense advice to 26-year-old Manchester United star Marcus Rashford.
The footballer made himself an enemy of the right-wing press and the papers have been delighting in his recent crimes: the kind of drinking and waywardness that would be absolutely unsurprising for any other man in his twenties, but which must be made into a subject of endless debate if an athlete indulges in them.
Presented as an open letter – possibly the smuggest conceit available to the lazy newspaper columnist – Morgan’s piece was in equal parts patronising, sanctimonious, and self-aggrandising.
“It’s customary at such a turbulent stage of a Manchester United superstar’s career for them to sit down with me for a tell-all Uncensored interview, as Cristiano Ronaldo did 14 months ago,” he began.
What Morgan didn’t mention is that he would crawl over broken glass for Rashford to rock up on an episode of Piers Morgan Unwatched, TalkTV’s ludicrously expensive ‘flagship’ show. If the player did, for some unknown reason, make an appearance, you can be sure that Morgan’s obsequious side would be on show rather than the faux-tough guy act he opted for in the column.
Morgan – a man with more gall than a complete library of Asterix books – asked Rashford if he’s proud of himself and, even more egregiously, whether his mum is proud of him. The behaviour that’s meant to have outweighed Rashford’s previous performances on the pitch and his campaigning on Free School Meals is “a 12-hour tequila-fuelled bender in Belfast” and lying about being sick to miss training.
That’s it. That’s unwise for a man on the kind of money Rashford’s paid but hardly justification for a sermon from Reverend Morgan of Little Self-Awareness.
Morgan’s own contract is worth £17 million over two years and he’s hardly smashing in the goals for his ageing antipodean gaffer, Rupert Murdoch. Should a man with lacklustre ratings but an unshakeable ego really be sneering about “[young] players [strutting] around like world champions when their trophy cabinets are [empty]”?
The idea that Morgan and The Sun aren’t not-so-secretly delighted that Rashford is struggling is even less convincing than his teeth and tan.
Labour Backs Leveson-Style Press Reforms in Commons Vote
The Labour Party, which had recently shown signs it might abandon altogether the pursuit of reform of the media, has this week renewed its support for Leveson-style press regulation, albeit in low-key fashion.
In a House of Commons debate on the Government’s plan to scrap the last element of the Leveson reform scheme left on the statute books, Labour members voted for an amendment aimed at preventing complete repeal.
Shadow Culture Secretary Thangam Debonnaire, setting out her party’s position, told MPs: "We on the Labour benches want a press that is regulated in a way that makes it accountable for its reporting and that meets the highest ethical and journalistic standards."
Labour members then voted in favour of an amendment tabled by rebel Conservative MP George Eustice which aims to keep alive the Leveson scheme to encourage news publishers to participate in effective regulation that is both independent of the industry and free from political interference.
In terms of parliamentary procedure, it was the least that Labour could do in relation to reforms it had backed strongly, under successive leaders, ever since the Leveson Inquiry into the culture, ethics and practices of the press, which followed the exposure of the phone-hacking scandal, produced its recommendations in 2012.
At issue was section 40 of the Crime and Courts Act, which provides incentives – ‘sticks and carrots’ – for the press to join a Leveson-standard regulator. Though the Conservatives voted for it in 2013, successive Conservative governments have refused to implement it and, in a sop to its press friends, Rishi Sunak's Government is now trying to repeal it altogether.
Whether it can be repealed before a general election is uncertain after this week’s Commons vote – the Lords must now have their say – but for those in favour of better press regulation and of press reform generally, it is the position adopted by Labour, as the prospective next government, that is most important.
Had Labour abstained on the Eustice amendment, as it had shown signs it was preparing to do, it would have meant the abandonment by the party of even the most cautious aspiration to challenge press power – a cause that has strong support on the party’s backbenches.
The Liberal Democrats and Scottish National Party also supported the amendment.
Explaining Labour’s position on the Eustice amendment, Debonnaire told the Commons: "The majority of British journalists are decent and honourable, but there are some who even now continue to drag the good name of that profession into disrepute. That profession is a cornerstone of our democracy and it is important that the public are able to trust it, but at the moment we are at risk of the public losing faith in the profession of journalism, as was certainly also the case before section 40 was created and before that scandal was exposed."
Read the debate here, starting at column 749.
Brian Cathcart is a journalist, academic and campaigner. He was one of the founders of the Hacked Off group for a free and accountable press and which campaigned against the repeal of section 40
Time for Truth: Calls Grow for Police Probe into Piers Morgan and Mirror Editors
Scotland Yard is facing growing calls to re-investigate Piers Morgan and a “generation” of former Mirror Group Newspapers editors for systemic newsroom criminality and years of cover-up, Byline Times can reveal.
As claimants saw a bid to overturn a time-bar on hundreds of potential civil suits against the publisher adjourned yesterday, victims, lawyers and a former detective joined Prince Harry’s demand for the police and Crown Prosecution Service to do “its duty”.
It follows a significant High Court victory for the Duke of Sussex last month in which Mr Justice Fancourt found industrial scale unlawful information gathering (UIG) went on at MGN’s three national newspapers between 1996 and 2011.
Among extensive findings of wrongdoing, the judge said MGN executives not only knew about the illegal activity and “could and should” have stopped it, but instead of doing so “turned a blind eye to what was going on, and positively concealed it”.
Now media lawyer Jonathan Coad; actress Denise Welch; and former Crimewatch presenter, journalist and police officer Jacqui Hames are calling on Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley to re-open Operation Golding, the phone-hacking investigation that saw Morgan interviewed in February 2014.
Despite uncovering significant evidence and putting substantial public resources into Golding, former director of Public Prosecutions Alison Saunders decided in 2015 that there was “insufficient” prospect of winning a conviction “in any” of 10 potential cases against MGN employees.
However, Jonathan Coad believes the ruling in the case of Duke of Sussex and Others vs MGN Ltd offers a compelling case for investigation of the Mirror Group over findings that lawyers and some board members hid endemic criminality, misled shareholders, the stock market, a public inquiry, and the High Court itself.
“Prince Harry’s seismic win over Mirror Group Newspapers has summoned the chickens home to roost," he told Byline Times. "Despite the publisher’s expenditure of millions in legal fees to cover it up, the judge found such a plethora of law-breaking at Piers Morgan's Mirror that for any public confidence to survive in the criminal justice system as applies to the behemoths of Fleet Street, there must now be a full investigation by the Metropolitan Police.”
The denials of knowledge of newsroom crimes – offered under oath by a succession of former Mirror bosses to the 2011-12 Leveson Inquiry into press misconduct – ought also to be probed, according to Mr Coad.
The 2005 Inquiries Act makes it a specific offence to knowingly give wrong or distorted evidence to a public inquiry. And Prince Harry’s lawyers were able to prove that MGN continued to hack phones for stories – the industry practice that sparked the inquiry – even after Lord Justice Leveson was conducting the televised questioning of witnesses.
“Justice Fancourt’s findings exposed an entire generation of editors, lawyers, and some board members conspiring together in a form of organised crime which goes far beyond the mere tabloid espionage at the heart of Harry's case," Mr Coad added.
“Now arise issues such as the impact on the Mirror shareholders, the lies the company told the public and authorities, as well as lies individuals appear to have told the Leveson inquiry under oath.”
Following the 386-page ruling on 15 December, Scotland Yard said it was “carefully considering” its content before taking decisions on further action.
Outside court, Prince Harry's lawyers read a statement in which he urged UK authorities “to do their duty for the British public and investigate bringing charges against the company and those who have broken the law”.
Scotland Yard told Byline Times this week that its position has not changed and that the judgment remains under review.
Jacqui Hames is calling on her former employers to heed lessons of 2006 when it failed to properly investigate Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World, following the hacking of Royal Household phones by private investigator Glenn Mulcaire and former royal editor Clive Goodman.
“It’s clear that opportunities to properly investigate crimes at the News of the World in 2006 were lost, creating a perception that the newspaper group used its influence on the Met to cover up the sheer scale of offending," she said.
“In 2015, the Met wrote off large amounts of public money by aborting Operation Golding after pressure from the press, calling it a witch-hunt, portraying themselves as victims. Perhaps if it had continued, the successful legal action brought by Prince Harry and others in 2023 using the wealth evidence the Met had gathered, would have been unnecessary.
“On reflection, it’s very hard not to join the dots between the newspaper industry and political influence in the Met’s decisions. The public interest must not once again be sacrificed by self-interest. We cannot let this pass unchallenged.”
The voicemails of Denise Welch were hacked and her hotel room illegally bugged by MGN in 2002 and 2003 at the order of Sunday Mirror editors Tina Weaver and Mark Thomas (both Morgan proteges) who have never faced criminal charges despite clear admissions of wrongdoing – and the payment of damages to victims – on their behalf by their former employers.
Welch likened the lack of official action to the Post Office Horizon scandal or the enabling of Jimmy Savile. She said: “So many lives were devastated by the top decision-makers at Mirror Group, yet none has faced justice despite masses of evidence coming out in Prince Harry’s case and hundreds of others.
“It went far beyond phone-hacking, which is all Piers Morgan denies. My hotel rooms were bugged by people working directly for Mirror editors. I was then entrapped into talking about things that were my private business, which was incredibly cruel. Like many, I lived for years without trusting a soul. The impact was huge for my family and I. I believed for a long time that an actor friend had sold a story on me. Friendships were wrecked.
“At that time, my young son was seriously ill in Alder Hey hospital and needed life-saving surgery. The thought that people were listening in to my life during this distressing time and continued to do so for years sickens me.
“But the people at the top of these papers, who benefited most, have been allowed to escape when they should face justice. I do not know why they are able to get away with it. We’ve seen what happens with Jimmy Savile or the Post Office scandal when a blind eye is turned to wrongdoing. The police should certainly be investigating.”
The calls for action come as MGN’s former top lawyer, Marcus Partington, faces a separate investigation by the Solicitors’ Regulation Authority over his involvement in cover-ups at the company. The SRA announcement comes four years after this newspaper's sister site Byline Investigates first asked the regulator whether it was looking into his professional conduct.
They also come as speculation mounts over Gary Jones, the Editor of the Daily and Sunday Express, newspapers with the same owners as MGN – Reach plc. Sources at Reach have told Byline Times to expect a decision on his future with the firm “in due course”. When asked, the company declined to comment.
In December, Justice Fancourt found that Jones was one among a string of Morgan-connected editors and senior staff heavily involved in the commission of illegal spying on which MGN’s three national newspapers – the Daily Mirror, The Sunday Mirror and The Sunday People – spent millions of pounds between 1995 and 2011.
Jones was singled out in particular. He obtained private bank account details for, among others, Prince and Princess Michael of Kent, former New Labour Downing Street director of communications Alastair Campbell, former New Labour Minister Peter Mandelson, and members of the Bank of England Credit Committee.
The judge ruled that other key MGN figures, some of whom now hold senior roles at other organisations, were aware or likely aware of illegal activity – including Richard Wallace, now Piers Morgan’s boss at Murdoch-owned TalkTV and Neil Wallis, former editor of The People who in 2015 was acquitted of phone-hacking charges relating to his time as Deputy Editor at the News of the World.
Others include Morgan’s Mirror Deputy Editor Tina Weaver (for whom he advocated in 2001 to become Sunday Mirror editor), Morgan’s former Features Editor Mark Thomas, and Sunday Mirror and The People Senior Editors Nick Buckley and James Scott – the journalist who handed Morgan one of his biggest Mirror scoops hacked straight from the voicemails of former England football manager Sven Goran Eriksson and television presenter Ulrika Jonsson.
Justice Fancourt said that, while most of the directors of Trinity Mirror plc – the former name for MGN – did not know about illegal activity, two did. Paul Vickers, the group legal director, “certainly knew about phone hacking from about the end of 2003”; while the ex-Mirror chief executive Sly Bailey knew of hacking.
The board executives “knew about the illegal activity that was going at their newspapers and could and should have put a stop to it", the judge said. Instead, "they turned a blind eye to what was going on, and positively concealed it".
MGN abandoned a long-held policy of paying off claimants before they got to court in order to allow Prince Harry’s trial to proceed last May and June. The company – having vacated several trial dates – was keen to test the law of ‘limitation’ in the hope of time-barring potentially hundreds, if not more than a thousand, future claims from proceeding under a six-year time-out rule.
Despite the damage it suffered in the trial – it emerged yesterday that MGN is facing a costs bill from the ‘other side’ of £2 million – the company still considered it a victory, because it was able to include two of the weakest claims on the issue of limitation (among the many in the wings) around which to argue its point, and in the cases of Fiona Wightman, former wife of comedian Paul Whitehouse, and the actress Nikki Sanderson it won, even though the judge found they had indeed been victims of illegal behaviour.
But yesterday that victory was called into doubt as a bid was launched to appeal against the judge’s view that the pair ought to have known sooner they had cases to bring, despite the concealment of a lot of criminality by MGN.
Justice Fancourt was presented with four grounds under which his judgment is said to have misapplied the law – among them a ruling they should as individuals have acted as “hyper-vigilant” “detectives” in pursuing their claims.
His decision on whether to grant an appeal will be heard at a date to be set. However, even if he denies it, the matter is likely to be taken out of his hands and referred to the Court of Appeal for review.
Meanwhile, Rupert Murdoch’s News Group Newspapers (NGN) also ought to face investigation into its illegal scrutiny of political opponents to a bid to buy Sky TV in 2010-11, according to former Liberal Democrat Minister Chris Huhne.
In December, Huhne won his case for phone-hacking against NGN. Last week, in an interview with former Guardian investigative journalist Nick Davies at London's Frontline Club, Huhne said he hoped Met Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley would look into prosecuting senior executives at the company.
Huhne said in December that he believed the settlement "vindicates my long-standing claim that News Corporation directors and managers targeted me to get rid of a political opponent".
"My case is unprecedented because the unlawful information-gathering was directed not by journalists but by News Corp executives," he added. "They had two objectives: corporate espionage to help Murdoch's bid for Sky, and bull-dozing pesky politicians out of the way."
In a statement following the settlement, a spokesman said it "strongly denied that there was any corporate motive or direction to obtain information unlawfully", and that the stories published "were legitimate and in the public interest".
Dan Evans is a phone-hacking whistleblower and was a witness for the claimants in Sussex and Ors vs MGN Ltd and Gulati and Ors vs MGN Ltd. Tom Latchem was a trainee reporter with MGN and worked for the company between 2006 and 2009
Do you have a story for Byline Times to investigate?
Get in touch confidentially by emailing: news@bylinetimes.com
The BBC vs The Post Office: The Undeclared Conflict of Interest as Panorama Investigated the Horizon Scandal
In the summer of 2015 our BBC Panorama, Trouble At The Post Office, kept on not making the airwaves. Meanwhile, the chair of the Post Office, Alice Perkins, was leading its cover-up of the Horizon scandal from a secretive sub-committee, ‘Operation Sparrow’. At the same time, Perkins was also on the executive board of the broadcaster. She did not register this conflict of interest. Why?
The Post Office’s cover-up attempted to shut down doubts about its Horizon computer – the very subject of our Panorama. We had a whistle-blower who said Horizon made up numbers. The Post Office had a member of the BBC’s executive board working flat out to deny the basis of our story.
Perkins, Post Office CEO Paula Vennells, and its PR man Mark Davies, worked hard to silence our Panorama team from telling the stories of three extraordinary sub-postmasters: Jo Hamilton from Hampshire, Noel Thomas from Ynys Môn, and Seema Misra from West Byfleet.
Jo almost went to jail but pleaded guilty to false accounting. Noel was imprisoned in Liverpool. Seema was behind bars when she was eight weeks pregnant.
All three told me that, when they said that Horizon was generating false numbers, they were told: “You are the only one.” That wasn’t a machine lie but a human one.
But it’s only in recent days that I have fully understood the depth of the Post Office operation against us.
A Science Fiction Nightmare
The old 1980s Post Office telegram Puch moped the Panorama team made me ride up and down Hampshire’s rolling countryside was a pig, forever conking out uphill so that I had to get off and push. It was a good metaphor for our investigation into Horizon, but not an exact one. Horizon did something much more scary.
The Post Office’s machine lied. Horizon warped reality, making up numbers so that good people went to prison for things that never happened.
No wonder that the scandal has caused such a revolt against the figures and the institutions that sided with the machine that lied over the frail but true humans. It was a science fiction nightmare that came to the place in every town and village in our country where we get our stamps.
Not only were bosses conned by a machine, they were paid a lot of good money to shut down questions about its lies. Corruption is a heavy word, and I am not using it against anyone embroiled in the Post Office scandal, but the money certainly prolonged the machine’s lifetime as a credible witness in and out of court while lives were being ruined.
Trouble At The Post Office, when it was broadcast in August 2015, proved that the machine was lying. We got that from the horse’s mouth, Richard Roll, a former Fujitsu software engineer on Horizon.
He told me there were “a lot of errors, a lot glitches, coming through.” When I clarified, whether there were errors in the system, he replied: “There were errors with the system.” Note the change of preposition.
A machine that lied, the power of money and an ancient British institution that had become a kind of cult. I put that analogy to the human nemesis of the machine, Alan Bates. He chuckled gently – eerily like Toby Jones in the ITV drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office – and replied: “Paula Vennells was the High Priestess.”
A second High Priestess was Alice Perkins who, in May, June and July 2015, lived with the mother of all conflicts of interest. I have trawled through the relevant BBC minutes for that period and I can find no declaration of it.
As a reporter, you learn to go in hard against the people you sympathise with.
When I asked Jo Hamilton if she had a history of committing crime, she replied: “I hadn’t even had a parking ticket up until then so you know I don’t have a criminal history.”
Noel Thomas was a pillar of his community, nigh-on teetotal, chapel-going. “My cellmate was a Liverpool drug dealer,” he said. “He looked after me. I spent my 60th birthday in prison.” The shame in his voice was haunting.
We cut the next bit but it was funny. “My cellmates threw a party for me,” Noel told me. “I’ve never seen so much alcohol in all my life.” Liverpool’s nicked drug dealers had a better understanding of human nature than the Post Office bosses. They knew Noel wasn’t a thief.
Seema’s agony was the worst. “There is no evidence that I’ve taken any money, and then the jury came back with the verdict of guilty,” she told me, her voice breaking. “What I… had in front of me… my husband, my children and I’m pregnant at that time.”
Sentenced to 15 months, she said prison was “like a nightmare” and at one point she thought “I’m not going to get out of here alive, I’ll be dead.”
Operation Sparrow
I put the sub-postmasters through the mill to test them, to make sure, as far as humanly possible, that they were not making things up.
The Post Office worked very hard to stop the programme being broadcast or to water it down – even though it and Fujitsu were sitting on internal evidence that Horizon was flawed.
A report by consultants Ernst and Young sent to Post Office directors in 2011 warned that Fujitsu staff had “unrestricted access” to sub-postmasters' accounts that "may lead to the processing of unauthorised or erroneous transactions”.
Perkins, a former senior civil servant, became chair of the Post Office the same year Ernst and Young reported on Horizon’s faults.
On 1 April 2014, while still chairing the Post Office, she was appointed to the BBC’s executive board. Then Director-General Tony Hall noted that her “wealth of experience at the highest levels of public life, as well as her experience of organisations going through change, will be immensely valuable as we make the BBC simpler and better run.” Hall’s press release has not aged well.
That very month, April 2014, Perkins led a Post Office sub-committee, Project Sparrow, according to documents brought to surface by Andy Verity of the BBC.
Project Sparrow was set up in the wake of a 2013 report by Second Sight, independent auditors, which identified computer bugs that raised doubts over the reliability of Horizon data used to prosecute sub-postmasters. Rather than make the Second Sight findings public, Project Sparrow sidelined and then sacked the auditors and set out to limit payments to sub-postmasters who had lost fortunes.
The project placed Alice Perkins at the heart of the Post Office cover-up, which makes her conflict of interest at the BBC all the more concerning. Perkins was in charge when the Post Office first heard of our Panorama programme on 19 May 2015.
Post Office bosses Angela van den Bogerd, Patrick Bourke, and PR man Mark Davies insisted in an on-the-record briefing to my colleagues that Horizon was robust. Van den Bogerd said any changes “would leave a footprint”. While Bourke claimed that “it is 100% true to say we can't change, alter, modify, existing transaction data, so the integrity is 100% preserved”.
Logically, they were implying that the sub-postmasters must be thieves. Factually, they were wrong. Fujitsu was changing the data and that could change the postmasters’ reckonings. Both the 2011 report by Ernst and Young and the 2013 Second Sight report showed that the Post Office bosses were not being open with the Panorama team.
Mark Davies met Panorama’s then Editor Ceri Thomas for a meeting. According to the submission of ShEx – the government’s controlling body over the Post Office – to the public inquiry into the scandal, he had a “‘very substantial other written and oral briefing’ including several hours of meetings and six one hour calls with the Editor and his deputy”.
Our Panorama was due to be broadcast on 22 June. Then it was delayed until 29 June. Thomas put it on the shelf while he went on holiday for six weeks.
He said this week that “the programme we made broke new ground and it’s stood the test of time extremely well” and that “I don't know where ShEx got its information that I and my deputy had ‘several hours of meetings and six one hour calls with the Editor and his deputy’ but it's categorically untrue”.
According to Thomas, “we had one meeting as far as I can recall and a small number of phone calls which lasted minutes not hours. Those conversations were off-camera but not off-the-record. If any useful new information had come out of them it would have gone to the programme team but, in fact, the Post Office simply used them to repeat the refrain that Horizon was infallible and had no back-door.”
He said he was unaware of Alice Perkins’ “various roles” and had no contact with her at the BBC.
Trouble At The Post Office went out on 17 August 2015.
Perkins quit the Post Office on 31 July 2015 but stayed on at the BBC for several more years.
When asked how, from mid-May until the end of July 2015, had she managed the conflict of interest of working for one British institution which was investigating another British institution she was chairing, Perkins did not respond.
Fleet Street’s Blind Eye
Our whistle-blower, Richard Roll, told the truth, that the Horizon machine was an error factory. From August 2015 onwards, the Post Office stopped prosecuting sub-postmasters where Horizon was part of the story.
Three million people watched Trouble At The Post Office, but the Post Office continued to deny, claiming that the BBC had broadcast “unsubstantiated allegations”. Its boss, Paula Vennells, told the government body which owns the Post Office that the programme “contained no new information and received almost no pick-up from other media”.
Vennells’ last seven words were true – to the shame of Fleet Street. With the exceptions of Private Eye and Computer Weekly, the media were rubbish in the early days.
But Vennells’ “no pick-up” victory was not entire. One viewer of our Panorama was Patrick Green KC who, as a result, teamed up with Mr Bates and 550 other sub-postmasters to sue the Post Office. They won and that victory made the recent ITV drama possible.
MPs of all colours stood up for their sub-postmasters, but a special mention should go to Lord James Arthbuthnot, Jo Hamilton’s then Conservative MP, who called for Vennells’ resignation in our Panorama. Instead, a Conservative Government awarded her a CBE.
In the round, I don’t think it’s fair to blame Ed Davey, Postal Affairs Minister up to 2012, or Keir Starmer, Director of Public Prosecutions up to 2013, for not challenging the Post Office head on – because they did not have the non-partisan evidence of Richard Roll to rely on.
But, from August 2015, it is fair to question the lack of judgement of successive Postal Affairs Ministers. They knew that people had gone to prison on the basis of a machine that told lies. And they did too little about it, too late.
‘Media Bill Votes Will Show Us the Real Keir Starmer’
Votes in the House of Commons tomorrow, 30 January, will tell us a great deal about the kind of Labour Party Keir Starmer intends to lead into this year’s general election and the kind of government he envisages beyond that.
With the Government’s Media Bill reaching its report stage, Labour must choose whether to back amendments which would keep alive the possibility of Leveson-style reform of press regulation – or to do nothing and allow the Conservatives to bury it for good.
The choice it makes will tell us whether it hopes ultimately to govern the country on an independent agenda or whether it has decided to let billionaire press owners continue dominating the country’s politics by their familiar unscrupulous means.
The Leveson Inquiry – into the culture, practices, and ethics of the press – took place following the exposure of the phone-hacking scandal in 2011-12. It made a number of recommendations.
Until now, Labour policy has been pro-Leveson – a position that goes back beyond the Jeremy Corbyn years to when Ed Miliband was leader. But it is also a policy feared and hated by the big national newspaper groups.
In recent months, all the body language of the Starmer leadership has suggested it is now ready to appease the billionaire owners of the Mail, The Sun, The Times and the Telegraph, evidently in the short-term hope that they will give it a softer ride in election coverage.
The precise issue tomorrow might seem obscure: whether to repeal section 40 of the Crime and Courts Act of 2013 – a piece of legislation which, thanks to the unscrupulous blocking tactics of the Conservatives, has never been allowed to enter into force.
Section 40 is the key to making the Leveson reforms of press regulation work. It was designed to make possible independent, effective press accountability of a kind that the UK has never known. More than that, it would also give press journalism unprecedented protection against bullying by the rich and powerful.
Murdoch, Lord Rothermere and the Barclay family fear press accountability like nothing else – because their newspapers simply could not function as they currently do if they were truly answerable for inaccuracy, distortion, intrusion and other ethical misconduct.
If Starmer’s Labour abandons a decade of commitment to Section 40 tomorrow, therefore, they will be giving the press what they want: licensing the big national newspapers to continue abusing ordinary citizens and misleading the public as a whole.
And everything suggests that that is Labour’s intention.
Not only has it failed to table any amendment relating to repeal of section 40 (and amendments are what the parliamentary ‘report stage’ is all about) but the party leadership has dropped heavy hints that it will not even support weak amendments tabled by others.
You might say that it does not matter, since the Conservatives have the votes to get what they want whatever Labour does, and that may be so. But the position Labour takes on this will send a clear signal to Fleet Street and to the public.
Appeasing the press is not merely a tactic for getting through an election. It will show that Labour is ready to accept right-wing press influence over its policies when it is in government.
Only a fool could imagine that the Murdoch and Mail papers do not intend to bully and hound a new Labour government, no matter how big its majority. Only a fool could believe that they do not intend to use all their unscrupulous methods to force Labour’s hand on Europe, on welfare, on climate change, on refugees – on their whole bigoted, selfish agenda.
If Labour takes them on, if it makes them responsible to an effective, independent regulator, it will be able to govern in the interests of the public – in other words, of ordinary people. If it does not, it will have its arm twisted permanently behind its back by the press billionaires.
And it would be naive and wrongheaded to imagine that Labour might duck the issue now but turn around and take action on media abuses after it has been elected, without a manifesto mandate. British politics does not work that way.
Tomorrow’s votes will tell us a lot.
The War On Journalism In Belmarsh, The War On Journalism In Gaza
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
https://medium.com/media/50246d0d4fb62937105f33e6e8bacd34/href
I haven’t written much about Julian Assange lately because I’ve been so fixated on what’s been happening in Gaza, but we should all be acutely aware that the 20th and 21st of February may be the WikiLeaks founder’s final chance to avoid extradition to the United States to face persecution for the crime of good journalism.
Assange and his legal team will face two High Court judges during the two-day hearing in London, who will then determine whether or not the UK will allow the Australian journalist to be dragged to the US in chains for a crooked show trial and cast into one of the world’s most draconian prison systems for exposing the war crimes of the world’s most powerful government.
Some US lawmakers are attempting to block the extradition from the other end with House Resolution 934, which asserts that “regular journalistic activities are protected under the First Amendment, and that the United States ought to drop all charges against and attempts to extradite Julian Assange.” If charges were dropped it would not only prevent the extradition but allow for Assange to be freed from the Belmarsh maximum security prison, where he has been jailed by the British government since 2019.
WikiLeaks on Twitter: "Call your representative today & urge them to sign Resolution 934: "Regular journalistic activities are protected under the First Amendment, and that the United States ought to drop all charges against and attempts to extradite Julian Assange" #FreeAssangehttps://t.co/WQHqkcdzip pic.twitter.com/87xK441wv9 / Twitter"
Call your representative today & urge them to sign Resolution 934: "Regular journalistic activities are protected under the First Amendment, and that the United States ought to drop all charges against and attempts to extradite Julian Assange" #FreeAssangehttps://t.co/WQHqkcdzip pic.twitter.com/87xK441wv9
The fight to free Assange is a fight to protect press freedoms around the world, since the US is using the case in an attempt to set a legal precedent for extraditing and imprisoning any journalist or publisher anywhere in the world who shares information with the public that the US doesn’t want shared.
And it’s worth mentioning that this fight is not actually separate from the fight against Israel’s efforts to keep journalism out of Gaza by assassinating reporters and blocking the press from entering the enclave. It’s also not separate from humanity’s overall struggle to build a truth-based civilization, nor ultimately from our greater struggle to become a conscious species.
All throughout humanity there are pushes toward truth and seeing and pushes toward secrecy and darkness. In the press we see both: the authentic journalists like Assange who want all that is hidden to be made transparent, and the propagandists of the mainstream media who work to obfuscate and distort the truth. Those who seek the emergence of a harmonious and truth-based society want as much visibility into what’s really happening as possible, while tyrannical power structures like the US empire and Israel are constantly working to dim the lights.
Stella Assange #FreeAssangeNOW on Twitter: "Day X is here.The public hearing at the Royal Courts of Justice will be on 20-21 February. It may be the final chance for the UK to stop Julian's extradition. Gather outside the court at 8:30am on both days. It's now or never. #DayX #FreeAssangeNOW #JournalismIsNotACrime pic.twitter.com/RL3e8FMxoJ / Twitter"
Day X is here.The public hearing at the Royal Courts of Justice will be on 20-21 February. It may be the final chance for the UK to stop Julian's extradition. Gather outside the court at 8:30am on both days. It's now or never. #DayX #FreeAssangeNOW #JournalismIsNotACrime pic.twitter.com/RL3e8FMxoJ
Wherever you see domination and abuse, you see efforts to limit perception and keep human minds from seeing and understanding what’s going on. It’s true of empires, it’s true of governments, it’s true of cult leaders, it’s true of abusive spouses, and it’s true of the unpleasant dynamics within our own psyches that we would rather not look at. The less seeing there is, the more abusiveness is possible; the more seen things become, the closer we get to freedom.
I’m no prophet, but I strongly suspect that our future as a species will be determined by the outcome of this struggle. If the impulse toward truth and seeing wins out, we are probably headed toward a world of health and harmony. If the impulse to keep everything confused and hidden and unconscious wins, we are probably headed for dystopia and extinction.
In any case, all we can do is fight to make things more visible so that health and harmony become possible. Fight to make things conscious within ourselves. Fight to keep journalism legal in the shadow of the empire. Fight to spotlight Israel’s atrocities in Gaza. Fight to make the unseen seen. Fight to bring humanity into the light of consciousness.
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Uni ‘urgently investigating’ pro-Israel professor who told Greenstein ‘all Jews should be gassed’
Justin Stebbing says he was clearly speaking ironically in attack on left-wing, pro-Palestinian Jew Tony Greenstein – but went on to say Greenstein would have been ‘thrilled’ to murder all Jews during WWII
A professor at Imperial College is being ‘urgently’ investigated by the university after sending emails to left-wing Jewish pro-Palestinian activist Tony Greenstein about ‘gas[sing] all Jews.
Greenstein is a Brighton-based human rights campaigner who received a suspended sentence last year in a farcical trial for criminal damage to an Israeli-owned weapons factor when no damage occurred and who has been further targeted by anti-terror police for saying he supports the struggle of Gazans for freedom. He told Skwawkbox that he didn’t know who Stebbing was when he first received an email, from a personal email address, linking to discredited claims of mass rape and mutilation by Hamas and saying that Stebbing ‘agree[d] with you [Jews] should all be gassed‘.
Greenstein reported the incident to police as hate speech, but then realised Stebbing is an academic and, assuming his email had been hacked, contacted him on his university address to let him know. Greenstein said he was astonished when Stebbing wrote back – from his official email – to attack him further.
Stebbing retorted that he was being ‘ironic’ when he made his comment – but claimed that Greenstein would have been ‘thrilled to gas all Jews’ if he had been alive during the Second World War:
“My e mail was pure irony, but as always here the response to the crime is blamed. I have zero doubt that in WW2, you ,would have been thrilled to gas all Jews. That was the point I was making.”
The email headers showed that the email was genuinely from an Imperial email account. Greenstein accordingly sent a complaint to the university, which received an email acknowledgment.
Skwawkbox contacted Prof Stebbing about his emails to Greenstein. He responded:
The reason I wrote to Tony Greenstein was him contacting several senior colleagues accusing them of being doctors for genocide. He was of course aware he had just written that e mail and would and should have understood my e mail as being ironic in that context. We have had previous contact. Tony Greenstein knew that he’d written that so would have understood the context and this affects the meaning of what I wrote and it was clear, as I’d said, I was being ironic.
On Stebbing’s allegation that Greenstein had previous contact with him, Greenstein said:
They were doctors opposing a BMA statement calling for a ceasefire and accusing Israel of having broken international law including his colleague at Imperial. Yes I accused them of being Doctors 4 Genocide. There was an article in the Jewish Chronicle (see below) naming them. However Stebbing wasn’t named and I didn’t contact him. So it’s a lie that we have had previous contact. I’ve searched my email and his name doesn’t come up and it’s an unusual name so I would see immediately.
All these doctors say they have resigned from the BMA which is a good thing. Good riddance as Ghada Karmi said.
He added:
I emailed Stebbing to let him know that someone was clearly impersonating him. You could have blown me down with a feather when he responded saying that I was wrong. He wasn’t being impersonated. It was him. An ultra Zionist lunatic.
An Imperial College spokesperson told Skwawkbox that it was ‘urgently investigating this case involving a Visiting Professor’:
There is no place for antisemitic or hateful behaviour of any kind at Imperial. We are urgently investigating this case involving a Visiting Professor.
The International Court of Justice is expected to give a decision on South Africa’s application under the Genocide Convention for an order to Israel to stop its slaughter, which has killed and maimed more than a hundred thousand Palestinians, mostly women and children, as well as 117 journalists and more than 150 United Nations staff.
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Culture Secretary Hits Out at Supposed BBC Bias – But Claims Ofcom-Hit GB News is ‘Balanced’
Culture Secretary Lucy Frazer has criticised the BBC for a lack of impartiality, while appearing to praise controversial broadcaster GB News for being 'balanced'.
She claimed the BBC is no longer seen by viewers as “sufficiently impartial” – comments which made the front page of the Telegraph – as she announced that the public broadcaster’s website and social media will be subject to regulation by broadcast regulator Ofcom, ostensibly to make the BBC more accountable and trustworthy.
However, the Government's review of the BBC is not only confined to claims of impartiality but also funding.
Frazer said it is not appropriate for the BBC to have “criminal tools in its armoury” to prosecute people for not paying their TV licence fee, suggesting she will significantly water-down the body’s ability to enforce payment of the levy.
But this morning, she also downplayed criticisms of GB News, saying it offers “balance across the spectrum” when challenged about Conservative MPs interviewing other Conservative MPs on the channel, as well as the swathe of live Ofcom investigations into the broadcaster.
Jamie Stone MP, the Liberal Democrat spokesperson for culture, media and sport, hit back, said Frazer was prioritising 'culture wars' over supporting the BBC's delivery of quality services. "This attack on the BBC is yet another desperate distraction from a government in distress," he said.
"The BBC is the number one source of trusted news in the world and that comes down to proper independence and resilience to the political pressure we see from this Conservative Government," he added.
It comes amid the Government's push for reform within the BBC, following heated debates over its coverage of sensitive issues, including its reporting on the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel – with some critical of the BBC’s reluctance to call Hamas fighters “terrorists”.
There is also growing condemnation of the BBC’s Match of the Day host Gary Lineker, who is a freelancer but who faces heavy scrutiny over his political commentary on social media.
TV presenter India Willoughby questioned whether Frazer's concerns about bias applied to left-wing concerns over the BBC or were solely focused on allegations of bias against right-wing viewpoints. Meanwhile, Labour writer David Osland cited instances of senior BBC figures having close ties with the Conservative Party.
In a Sky News interview today, Frazer was challenged over the evidence for bias in the BBC. She could only point to broadcasting mistakes and “perceptions of bias” rather than any academic studies.
The latest prestigious Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism report indicated an increase in public trust in BBC News, contradicting the Government's stance.
Former BBC presenter Carol Vorderman and former senior BBC journalist Rob Burley have both highlighted the influence of Sir Robbie Gibb, a former head of communications for Prime Minister Theresa May, a member of the BBC Board, and a key figure in the launch of GB News as a former editorial advisor for the channel.
Frazer defended GB News, claiming it has "balance across the spectrum". She was asked on the BBC's Today programme whether GB News could be described as impartial when "so many of its shows are presented by former or current and often leading members of the governing party".
In comments widely publicised by the Ofcom-probed channel itself, Frazer replied: “A broadcaster has to be impartial over the spectrum of what it broadcasts, so I’ve listened to your news this morning and you’ve expressed this mid-term review in different ways across the programme this morning, sometimes putting the Government’s perspective, sometimes putting the BBC’s perspective.”
“There is a balance across the spectrum in relation to GB News, which isn’t regulated by the Government,” she added.
Dan Wootton’s 26 September 2023 show on GB News drew the most TV programme complaints to Ofcom in the whole year, with nearly 9,000 complaints. They followed misogynistic comments made by actor-turned-activist Laurence Fox about journalist Ava Evans. Fox was sacked by the channel and Wootton suspended.
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